I am not sure if it's EA or DICE that hate their own consumers but someone is making it difficult for me to love Battlefield 3 at the moment. After caving in and purchasing a Premium pass I am now unable to download all the extra content as it won't physically fit on my hard drive. My original beef was that they included the DLC in the update patches you were forced to download which meant you had to devote space to stuff you couldn't even access. However the upside was that if you did want it then it would all be there right? Wrong.
It seems that after Close Quarters someone must have thought that the solution was to separate out patches so instead of one massive patch there are, wait, TWO massive patches? Whose idea was that? What the hell is in all these giant files and how come they are so ridiculously enormous? It's maddening. Is there no way around it? We all welcome patches that smooth out bugs and hinder cheats but this is just preposterous. The only workaround is to buy a USB pen drive to house all these extra files that do virtually nothing. Thanks guys.
You can read my thoughts on it here http://craigdodson.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/theres-a-hole-in-my-bucket-dear-liza-dear-liza/
@angryfodder I am with you there but I can see how MP games would need a lot of patching. It's the size that baffles me.
You know my feelings on Battlefield and this stupid endless patching. It just isn't right that one game can literally take up your entire HD space. Just not worth it. Must be doubly maddening to find that you have bought it and you actually don't have capacity for it. Eeek.
@wavey_gravey I have to disagree that it is not worth it. I don't begrudge the space at all - every update has improved the game. The answer is bigger hardware capacity so the patches don't fill it...
@WorldOfHurt @wavey_gravey I dunno really, I find the size of the game ridiculous. I want to play other games on my console, not dedicate it to one game. The size is prohibitive, no matter the quality in my opinion.
1 Like @WorldOfHurt @wavey_gravey WOH, the xbox is a much better beast at handling patching/data installs than the PS3. I was shocked to find that my 120gb PS3 HDD was over half full despite only having about 10 games and owning ZERO DLC. I've played about 80ish games on XBOX 360, have several XBLA titles installed to the HDD and have only used about 10gb of space. That DOES NOT include BF3 though. That is the one game that was demanding 9GB alone just to play it. On xbox 360 it really is "the odd one out" and its not even reflected in the quality of the product.
@-INKling- @WorldOfHurt @wavey_gravey You have to remember WoH that the launch xbox was only 20GB, you can also get an Arcade Xbox that is only 4GB. As it stands those two machines that are on sale are not fit for purpose if you wanted to play BF3 on them. I appreciate the content, however I don't agree that a game should exceed the base system it has been made for.
For some people upgrading memory on a console isn't an issue, but for me that isn't why I like console gaming, I like the ease of having a machine that doesn't need me to do anything technical like that. If I wanted to prat around with more memory I would have bought a PC, in which case I can't complain about the system requirements. As it is, I didn't, I purchased a self contained unit that I expect to last the lifetime of however long developers are developing games for it.
I actually have a new xbox with 250GB so actually BF3 doesn't cause a memory issue for me, however the MASSIVE patching really put me off. The game is fantastic, but it just is THAT good for me to "waste" space on it.
@WorldOfHurt @wavey_gravey I know it's not the same thing but BC2 had only one giant patch that included Vietnam which was very different to the main game. For BF3 we are getting massive release patches AND DLC. It just seems like too much.
It would be interesting to see how far down the list memory considerations are when releasing software as memory is getting cheaper all the time. I am sure there are many people that are now 'patched out' and it would be interesting to see what an official response would be. Maybe they just don't care.
@wavey_gravey Even on PC, where the BF3 patches are double the console size to accommodate the graphic resolutions, the whole game plus all patches only takes up 24GB.
I don't know how much the total usage on console is, but I would imagine significantly less than that? That's not HDD-breaking, presuming you have a reasonably sized HDD of 250GB or so?
As I have written elsewhere, even at launch HDD sizes less than 60GB looked tiny. Games aren't getting smaller, everyone wants HD graphics and 5.1 sound.
10-15GB seems fair to me for the vast amount of content you receive.
